News Feeds - Importing and Exporting

Introduction

News articles published on your site are automatically included an RSS feed, allowing you to "export" your news. Other websites (including other Drupal Template sites) can use the feed URL to "import" a teaser view of your news items into their websites.

Exporting your News Articles to RSS Feeds

All Drupal Template sites automatically provide feed URLs at the /feeds path of the site. Right-click each link to copy the link URL. You can provide this URL to other websites (including other Drupal Template sites) that want to display your articles on their site.

All published news articles are included in a main news RSS feed called "All categories".

Displaying (Importing) News Articles from RSS Feeds

Drupal Template sites are also capable of importing news articles from other RSS feeds. There are two methods for doing this.

Method 1: External News Feed Widget

This widget can be placed on a landing page and will display content from an RSS feed in a list. Each article that's pulled will link off to the original article URL on the source website. Follow the instructions below to embed this widget on a page:

Go to an existing page (or a newly created page). Click Customize This page

In the sidebar, or any region you choose, click the Plus sign + to add a new pane.

Select News Feeds

Click the green Add tab

Use the paste command (Ctrl +V) to paste the feed link from Site A into the Feed URL field.

If the feed you're importing is from another Drupal Template site, there are some extra configuration options available.

Click Finish

Click Save

The data displayed in the feed is updated daily. Due to various caching, it may take up to 9 hours before new content in the RSS feed is displayed on your site for visitors.

Note that using this method, you cannot display the pulled articles anywhere except this widget.

Method 2: News Feed Importer (Special cases only)

This second method pulls content from the feed and creates News content type items. As such, this method provides more flexibility than the External News Feed Widget, because it allows you to treat the pulled content as normal news items on your site. This means they can be displayed in a news rotator or other news content panes.

This feature must first be enabled by a Site Administrator on your site. Please review the complete documentation below before enabling it, as it may not be appropriate for your use case.

Click "Apps" from the top nav bar (under "Manage")

Click "PWDS News Importer" from the list

Click the "Enable App" button and wait for the page to finishing loading.

In the future if you want to disable this feature, you can visit the same page and click the "Disable App" button. After waiting for the page to load, you should then click the "Uninstall App" button to completely remove the functionality. Please be sure to wait for the pages to completely finish loading when using these links.

Once the app is enabled, you can follow these instructions to use it:

Go to the Add Content page and click the "News Feed" item:

Fill out the fields on the form. Provide a descriptive label for the feed you're importing so you can easily identify it later. There are several options that control the behavior of the news importer. Save the form.

You're taken to a page that is used to control the news importer:

Follow the various instructions on this page to manage the feed.

Content from the source RSS feed will typically be refreshed once an hour, but you can also perform an on-demand import if needed.

Choosing the Correct Method

How do you know which method to use when displaying content from other RSS feeds?

WDS recommends using Method 1: External News Feed Widget. This provides a better user experience for your visitors (they don't have to click twice to get to the original article) and also prevents issues with search engines, because the articles are never actually imported as full pages on your site.

Method 2: News Feed Importer is useful only special circumstances where it's very important to incorporate the imported news articles as normal news content type articles on your site.